Website Audits: Why They Matter and How to Do Them Right

What is a Website Audit?

A Website Audit is a full examination of your website’s performance, SEO, content, security and user experience. It will highlight any issues in any of these areas, as well as opportunities for improvement and recommendations.

Audits are vital in ensuring your website is visible across search engines, improving the overall user experience and preventing security risks. This overall results in increases to your website traffic, engagement and conversion scores.

At Wibble, we don’t just build every WordPress project with the thorough checks outlined in this post but we also regularly rescue existing WordPress sites through our Wibble Rescue Package and have a proven track record of improving their performance, security, and user experience. See our case study for how we improved Google impression by 1,244% for MTB Law if you’d like to read more.

If you’d like a deeper dive into exactly how we achieve these results, check out our blog post on building high-performance WordPress websites, written by our lead web developer, Karl Proctor, or WordPress Technical SEO written by Irene Bhuiyan.

Why Combine Automated and Manual Audits?

Whilst Automated tools offer a thorough and fast approach to understanding areas of improvement from a technical, SEO and UX point of view, it’s also important to evaluate the user experience as a real life user. A combination of both automated and manual is the best approach with manual checks filling in the gaps that tools can’t cover.

Automated Auditing

See below for different areas and examples of testing and checks to carry out:

Recommended Free Tools

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider – checks for broken links, redirects, meta tags, headers and detection of large resources.
• Google PageSpeed Insights – looks at speed and core web vitals.
• Chrome Lighthouse – evaluates performance, accessibility and SEO. Shows un-minified or render-blocking resources.
• Google Search Console – Insights into Indexing and crawl errors as well as user Click through rates, Impressions and user queries.
• Google Transparency Report – check for blacklisting
• Sucuri – Checks for Website Security issues and Malware.
• Ahrefs Webmaster Tools – Backlinks, SEO health.
• Google Analytics – Provides metrics useful to assessing user engagement and areas of strength and weakness in relation to content.
• GT Metrix – Page speed and identifies large JS/CSS files.
• AI / Chat GPT – Can be helpful for summarising results and scores from SEO, Visitor behaviour, Accessibility and Performance tools, as well as actions for improvement. Can also be useful for suggestion of meta descriptions, title tags or highlighting missing headings (H1’s) or ordering of headings as well as researching trending content.
• Cookie Metrix – Compliance check for EU Cookie law by analysing the cookies installed before user consent is given.

Manual Auditing

While automated tools identify technical issues, they cannot fully assess real user experience, accessibility, or content clarity. Manual auditing fills these gaps and provides insights that only a real user can detect. It is useful for multiple users to perform UAT on a website regularly as each user will have a different perspective and way of using the website which may bring about new insights.

See below for different areas and examples of testing to carry out:

Recommended Tools

• Browser Devtools – Built into most browsers (Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox). Developer Tools allow you to inspect and test your website in real time without the need to install or use any external software. Handy to inspect elements, test responsiveness, check on console errors and view accessibility trees. If you are using Chrome you’ll also have Lighthouse Audit within the console too.
• Screen readers – Accessibility should be tested using the same tools your users rely on. Experiencing the website through a screen reader puts you in the position of someone who depends on these features, making it easier to identify whether the site is truly usable, clear and intuitive for all visitors. This will vary based on the device you use but most will have a built in option such as Narrator on Windows or VoiceOver on iOS. Use keyboard shortcuts and tabbing to navigate and interact with your website elements by moving down through headings, content and links.

Combine Findings and Prioritise

Once both automated and manual audits are complete, it’s important to organise and prioritise your findings. You can:

• Prioritise by Impact vs Effort — using Google Search Console data can help identify which pages or issues are affecting traffic most.
• Group by category (SEO, UX, Content, Performance, Security)
• Assign severity (High, Medium, Low)

Prioritise by Impact vs Effort:

Auditing Schedule

Websites are dynamic, new content is constantly being added, code changes implemented and SEO algorithms are forever changing their goalposts. Aim to re-run your Audit within a reasonable time frame like 3-6months or after any major updates. It’s also a good idea to compare your audits to keep a track of improvements and consistent issues.

This will help with tracking improvement you’ve implemented, re-testing issues and helps your website stay fast, secure and user friendly whilst maintaining a strong SEO score.

Conclusion

A website audit is more than a technical review, it is a strategic investment in your online presence. By combining automated tools with manual testing, you gain a complete view of your website’s performance, content quality, user experience, and security.

Benefits of regular audits allow you to:

• Enhance search visibility and traffic
• Improve user experience and engagement
• Maximise conversion opportunities
• Maintain compliance and security standards

Next steps: Start by addressing Quick Wins, plan Strategic Fixes, and schedule your next audit within 3–6 months to maintain a fast, secure, and user-friendly website.

If you need some help with your website or would like some help with a technical Audit of your existing site, get in touch.